While originally scheduled before the end of 2012, our code monkeys started to enjoy fixing bugs much more during the holiday period, so we gave them a few weeks more to let them shine. It turned out great:

We haven't been lazy even before this, as this release also comes with an impressive amount of other bug fixes: a total of over 470 bugs were closed since the 2.6 release, of which exactly 100 are direct bug fixes (with a commit link). Over 15 feature requests were granted directly or indirectly as well.

We are also proud to ship a completely updated handbook, with updated screenshots and help pages for the new features. In this context our thanks goes to the Google Code-In students who helped in updating the handbook. Several Code-In students also helped to test Amarok extensively, both with the 2.7 beta1 release and the development version. The students also helped in moving two old wiki instances to a new server, verifying articles were currently relevant with working links. In total, 10 students worked on a total of 47 tasks for Amarok: great work indeed!

First of all thank you for the new release! (and sorry my bad english -I'm spanish). I just wanted to say that for me (Kubuntu 12.10 - KDE 4.9.5) Amarok is only opening in system tray. When I click the Amarok icon from the Kickmenu, it doesn't open a new window, but the icon appears in the system tray...then I have to click the tray icon and Amarok opens correctly. So I need 2 clicks for opening an application that I use everyday... I'm using your new release and I was hoping this (bug?) would be closed :(.
Also, when playing a song if I click the stop button the song restarts and the fade effect is applied but at the beggining of the song, so if the song is at 2:32 (for example), the fade effect is applied in the first 3 seconds of the second, and I think that's not the desired effect (so maybe another bug?).
Thanks! (hope you undesrtood everything hahah)

The problem is most likely that your previous configuration file is still around, erase the $HOME/.kde/share/config/amarok* files and try again :)
For the fading, please submit a bug report, but try the phonon-backend-vlc first, this is most likely a problem of the phonon-backend-gstreamer

Hi,
as Myriam said, the system tray behaviour may be due to stale amarokrc. Or it may be just behaviour you don't notice: Amarok starts in a mode which it has been previously quit in, for example if you quit it while it is minimized to system tray, it starts in a system tray.
The second problem is actually a known bug being fixed right now. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=312062 for tracking progress.

"Amarok starts in a mode which it has been previously quit in, for example if you quit it while it is minimized to system tray, it starts in a system tray."
I remember banging my head to the wall around version 2.4 while trying to start Amarok iconified until an Amarok dev came to my help on the KDE SC forums. To be honest, while this behaviour is pretty much appreciated it's far from intuitive and really not well documented, it would be nice to have some arguments to pass to Amarok at launch time to force one mode or another (iconified vs. normal window mode).
Ranting apart, Amarok rulez, thank you!

Hi, by playing mp3 radio stream, Amarok still eating more and more and more RAM, after a few hours of listening I have hundreds of MB busy only for Amarok.
Amarok cannot recognize mp3.bin files (example here: " http://radar.lv/files/Seance_N557_2013.01.14.bin "), (with 2 years old Rhythmbox no problem with playing).
but very thanks, Amarok is one of the best.

Tests have shown that the RAM consumption only happens with the phonon-backend-gstreamer, try the phonon-backend-vlc isntead. As for the mp3.bin files: Amarok plays what the phonon backends provide, and seriously, mp3.bin is a weird format and an archive that should be extracted first.

Hey! Great you've released a new version. It's always a good news for me. Anyway, there's still missing upnp support. Amarok comes with upnp plugin but after I enable it nothing happens. I don't even know where should i look for discovered devices. Please tell me what do i do wrong. :)
It's a little shame, WMP has this and Amarok doesn't. :D

Same here, Kubuntu 12.10.
I know the UPNP shares should appear as a local collection.
After manually compiling kio-upnp-ms from github (and also hupnp 1.0 because Kubuntu ships an older release), my UPNP share actually shows up in the list, but is stuck showing "Counting.." (actually "Es wird gezählt..") and can't find any songs.
I suspect it's a bug with either the kio slave or hupnp, because I can't browse to upnp-ms:// URLs via dolphin (requests time out eventually). Only ?searchcapabilities=1 requests do work. So probably not Amarok's fault.
Not sure how to fix that, I digged through the code, but I'm not very skilled with C++ and especially Qt.. all those signals and slots confused me.

Hi, unfortunately, Amarok is not a music editing software nor audio effects post-processor, adding direct support for LADSPA plug-ins is beyond our scope.
On the other hand, Amarok just uses Phonon to play sounds, phonon then uses let's say gstreamer, which most commonly uses PulseAudio, which commonly uses ALSA to do the playback. I'm reasonably certain that you may plug LADSPA plugins to multiple levels down the stack, perhaps to gstreamer, PulseAudio or ALSA.

I would like to use amarok in order to sync music properly with both my nokia n9 (the simple nokia link app is not very refined...) and my old ipod. the thing is, that I like to keep music in high quality (lossless if possible) on my laptop, but then have the same file compressed on the mobile devices, since the quality does not matter so much there, without having to manually keep both files. basically just like you have in itunes, just working with any device and file type (flac as well). is this supported by amarok/ does a plugin exist?
thanks for your advise!!!

Every time there is a new Amarok release, it feels like Christmas again. Congrats on another release of Amarok. I have 2 items on my wishlist for future Amarok releases. 1. Better Android support and 2. A 4th window ala context, media sources and context window. I would like this 4th window to have the block & boom analyzers that used to come with the old Amarok. For those people that don't want to run it, they can simply disable it in the view menu.
I would put it right along the bottom length of the window, but it could/should be configurable.
Thanks again for all your hard work.